Democratic politicians who promised Americans they would greatly reduce the cost of pharmaceuticals never followed through with that commitment because they were enslaved to drug company lobbyists who secured millions in funds for their political campaigns, Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. said Monday.
Kennedy joined President Donald Trump, National Institutes of Health (NIH) Director Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Commissioner Dr. Marty Makary, and Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) Dr. Mehmet Oz, as Trump signed an executive order to significantly drop drug prices for Americans.
@POTUS just signed an Executive Order to lower prescription drug prices and put American patients FIRST!
“Starting today, the U.S. will no longer subsidize the healthcare of foreign countries… and we’ll no longer tolerate profiteering and price gouging from Big Pharma.” pic.twitter.com/1kQIs52M5s
— The White House (@WhiteHouse) May 12, 2025
“Starting today,” Trump said, “the US will no longer subsidize the healthcare of foreign countries … and we’ll no longer tolerate profiteering and price gouging from Big Pharma.” The order is titled “Delivering Most-Favored-Nation Prescription Drug-Pricing to American Patients.”
In his comments on what he referred to as “an extraordinary day,” Kennedy reflected on the significance of Trump’s action from the perspective of someone who “grew up in the Democratic Party.”
“[E]very major Democratic leader for 20 years has been making this promise to the American people,” the secretary said. “This was the fulcrum of Bernie Sanders’ runs for presidency – that he was going to eliminate this discrepancy between Europe and the United States.”
Kennedy observed, however, that “none” of the Democratic candidates followed through on the promise.
“It’s one of these promises that politicians make to their constituents, knowing that they’ll never have to do it,” he said. “And the reason they’ll never have to do it is because they know that Congress is controlled in so many ways by the pharmaceutical industry. There’s at least one pharmaceutical lobbyist for every congressman, every senator on Capitol Hill, and every member of the Supreme Court – in some estimates, three.”
The pharmaceutical industry, Kennedy continued, “spends three times … what the next largest lobbyist spends on lobbying.”
“Nobody wanted to do anything because it was radioactive,” he said about those who were ultimately elected after making the promise to address the tremendous costs Americans have been paying. “They knew you couldn’t get it by Congress.”
Turning to Trump, however, Kennedy said, “[W]e now have a president who is a man of his word.”
Noting that Trump himself received $100 million from the pharmaceutical industry as well – which the president acknowledged with a nod – Kennedy continued that, nevertheless, it has only been Trump “who has the courage” and “can’t be bought, unlike most of the politicians in this country.”
“[H]e is standing here for the American people,” Kennedy added, noting that some people, “like Elizabeth Warren or Robert Reich,” are accusing Trump of standing “on the side of the oligarchs.”
But the HHS secretary countered: “There has never been a president more willing to stand up to the oligarchs than President Donald Trump. And I’m very, very proud of you, Mr. President, for your courage … your intestinal fortitude, your stiff spine, and your willingness to stand up for the American people.”
Biden, Bernie, Obama, Klobuchar, Pocahontas, AOC, Blumenthal—ran their mouths about lowering drug prices.
But they lied. They protected The Democrat Corrupt Drug Pricing Scheme that bled Americans dry.@POTUS actually signed an EO to lower drug costs & put Americans first.
pic.twitter.com/waDwHnHMqA
— The White House (@WhiteHouse) May 12, 2025
Kennedy then explained the importance of the president’s order and the great discrepancy between what Americans spend on drugs versus what Europeans spend.
“We have 4.2% of the world’s population … our country represents 75% of the revenues for pharmaceutical companies,” he said. “[W]e spend, in our country, $1,126 per capita on drugs. In Britain, they spend about $240 – they spend 1/5 of what we do. And this is true across Europe … and the drug companies, Europeans – if you ask them, it made no sense what they were saying: America has to pay for this innovation or it’s not going to happen.”
“President Trump is saying to our European partners … you got to raise the amount that you’re paying for those drugs and pay for your share of the innovation, that the United States is no longer subsidizing that,” Kennedy continued. “[I]f Europeans raise the price of their drugs by just 20%, that is $10 trillion that can be spent on innovation, and the health of all people all across the globe is going to increase because we’re going to have better products.”
“This problem has persisted for decades,” agreed Jeffrey Tucker, the founder and president at Brownstone Institute, and psychiatrist Aaron Kheriaty, M.D., senior Brownstone counselor and scholar at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in DC.
The two authors explained Wednesday the basic problem with drug pricing that had never been addressed as a burden to Americans until Trump was re-elected.
“For the same pharmaceutical products, US prices can be anywhere between two and ten times higher in US markets compared to prices across the border,” they wrote. “Nor is importation allowed, even though this would drive prices toward equilibrium by facilitating market competition.”
“US taxpayers and health insurance subscribers subsidize pharmaceutical products for the rest of the world,” Tucker and Kheriaty pointed out, affirming the statements of Trump and Kennedy. “While many politicians have denounced this problem, and sworn to fix it with a genuine competitive market, the barriers have traced to the same source: entrenched industrial interests that like the rigged monopolistic system of price gouging as it is.”
Like Trump, the authors noted that, when pressed on the issue in the past, the pharmaceutical giants would simply say Americans were paying extra for “R&D,” or “research and development.”
But Tucker and Kheriaty pointed out that a 2015 study “found that pharmaceutical companies actually spend twice as much on marketing and sales than they do on R&D.”
“This indicates the true priorities of these companies,” they wrote. “That is to say, the exorbitant profits are not actually doing what these companies say they do.”
The authors underscored that, while this situation “has long been the status quo,” it is nevertheless one that “has now been shattered” by Trump’s new executive order, which “requires government agencies to be better stewards of tax dollars by only paying the lowest prices for drugs on international markets.”
“It also seeks to ‘facilitate direct-to-consumer purchasing programs for pharmaceutical manufacturers that sell their products to American patients,’ thus cutting out myriad levels of institutions–the hidden middlemen–that currently skim off exorbitant profits while contributing nothing of value,” they observed.
In his concluding comments during the press conference, Kennedy reflected again on the significance of Trump’s order in light of the fact that he – the secretary – comes from a family of staunch Democrats.
“I never thought that this would happen in my lifetime,” he said. “I have a couple of kids who are Democrats, are big Bernie Sanders fans, and when I told them that this was going to happen, they had tears in their eyes because they thought this is never going to happen in our lifetime, and we finally have a president who is willing to stand up for the American people.”
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